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Übergame (Working title)

Unread postby icycalm » 23 Jan 2014 03:33

http://culture.vg/features/commentary/a ... rgame.html

There is already a thread on this on 4chan: https://boards.4chan.org/v/res/228434674

It's ongoing, so I'll wait until it disappears from the main site and then I'll link the archived version and answer here whatever concerns I feel are worth answering.
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Unread postby icycalm » 23 Jan 2014 06:29

Archived version: https://archive.foolz.us/v/thread/228434674/

I'll get with the answers tomorrow.
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Jan 2014 20:47

NeoGAF thread: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=757442

I will discuss it along with the 4chan thread when it dies down, but for the time being I updated the announcement page to answer one of their concerns:

ShineALight wrote:Also comical that he's essentially making an indie game considering how he feels about those.


I wrote:Update: There is some confusion over whether this will be an "independent" game. As a matter of fact, it will be a highly dependent one: everyone will be dependent on everyone else — no one will be independent. Hope that clears this up.


I've already added a character artist to the team, so things are looking good from where I am standing.
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Unread postby icycalm » 26 Jan 2014 12:11

Some more threads:

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=48988
http://www.caltrops.com/pointy.php?acti ... pid=161903
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=38341.0

Pretty much the only real idea in all these threads is the belief that I am incapable of "delivering", whatever that's supposed to mean. I'll clear this issue up soon.

In the meantime I'd like to announce that I've finished ALL the aspects of the preliminary design -- both aesthetic (setting/plot) and mechanical. The design document is several pages long (perhaps 3 or 4 or so, I can't tell because I am writing in Wordpad), and, at least as far as mechanics are concerned, even if I dropped dead tomorrow a very capable director (think Clint Hocking, Sid Meier or Kojima) could take it from my hard drive and go off and complete the game in a couple of years, technology permitting (because the scope and concept of the game is so bleeding edge I don't think there's an engine on the market capable of powering it at the moment, except if it's custom-coded for absurd hardware like four GTX Titan Blacks or something). This as regards mechanics, because as regards plot development and "message", no one can finish this game but me. But I do plan to start writing down the full plot soon, so when that's done, yeah, I could very well drop dead and the game could still be made by someone else at some point down the line.

Here is a list of influences, to get an idea of the kind of complexity I am talking about:

Far Cry 2
Deus Ex
Sid Meier's Pirates!
Orgy of the Will
Blade Runner
Planetary Annihilation
Highlander
Elite
Dune (the Amiga videogame by Cryo)
Iron Man 3
Killer 7

From some of these works I am taking mechanics, from others aesthetics and plot, or scope and "message", or a combination of some or all of these. The design document includes detailed explanations of precisely what I am taking from each work, but I am not going to post it here because... as long as I am working on the project, I don't want anyone to run off with my ideas. Trust me when I say, though, you'd sell off your left kidney to play this game the moment you read the details of my design. Nothing else you've ever played comes close, and nothing remotely like it is being planned for any point in the foreseeable or even the unforeseeable future. You'd have more fun simply READING my design than PLAYING even the best future game that is currently in the planning stages. That's the kind of gigantic leap forward I am talking about here.

I am also planning a teaser trailer for release in a couple of months. I'll post more news here when I am ready to unveil them.
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Unread postby icycalm » 26 Jan 2014 12:18

Also, I moved the thread to the Welcome forum so that even non-subscribers can read it and help me attract more devs to staff the team. I'll have more details on new collaborators soon too.
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Unread postby icycalm » 26 Jan 2014 22:38

Finally, all those shitty threads produced something funny at least:

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?t ... #msg988275

BdkNPIiCUAAYPaL.jpg
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Unread postby icycalm » 26 Jan 2014 22:43

More laughs:

http://www.caltrops.com/pointy.php?acti ... pid=161955

Last wrote:It's hard to mock someone who's parodied themself so thoroughly.

You can't exaggerate his flaws for comedic effect because he's already taken them to absurd lengths.

"I've written a game based on Naruto/Madden/Crysis/Heath Ledger Joker/Citizen Kane and it's so good you'd pay a trillion dollars just to hear me describe it."

It lacks bite because that's more or less what he literally said. Thanks, icycalm? You've certainly taught us all a lesson, albeit not the one you probably intended.
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Unread postby icycalm » 27 Jan 2014 22:49

Here you can see how Googling works (Googling is the process via which all opinions on videogames are now generated):

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=758831

Arthea wrote:Best examples of mixing various genres into one glorious game

I had this discussion in mind for ages, but never got around making a good OP, being as lazy as I am. So instead I'll make simple OP.

Most of Suikoden fans know, that series are brilliant mix of very different genres: we have RPG part, strategic wars part, kind of fighting (simplistic though) style duels and lots of minigames, most being some sort of gambling, also let's not forget fishing or even farming.

Other example of great blend of genres is Puzzle Quest: Challenge of Warlords. It was so great that spawned plethora of RPG and match 3 hybrids, some being good, some bad.

Yet another example is Dune (1993, by Cryo Interactive) it mixed RTS with adventure game and did it really good. It might not seem so elaborate today, but it was a game to be experienced

More often than not mixing genres just don't work, but when it works it's great. These are some of my most beloved games.

Do you like such experiments? Care to share some good ones? Or bad ones to avoid?


You can see that he's just a weeaboo who got into games last month. So where did he hear of Cryo's Dune then? From the thread on my game which was made on their site a few days ago. So he googles it and copy-pastes the results, but in a manner which would lead others to believe that he didn't just find out about it 5 minutes ago and has never touched it in his life and never will.

As for the subject of genre-blending, how laughable are his examples lol. Suikoden and Puzzle Quest!

How about Herzog Zwei, Civilization, Shenmue, Deus Ex, Grand Theft Auto III, Dune II, Senko no Ronde, Far Cry and Far Cry 2, Pirates, Master of Magic, etc. etc. etc. In fact every great game ever was a genre-blending game, and all we are doing between one genre-blending game and another is playing tiny incremental updates until someone figures out how to make the next great genre-blending game that will lead the artform forward. And the only such games this fuckface on NeoGAF can think of are Suikoden and Puzzle Quest lol!

I mean look at all the retards who are laughing at my list of influences. They won't be laughing anymore when they see how perfectly I have fused all of them into the genre of the future. No, they'll be making shitty threads about how they are "done with gaming" because nobody can be bothered to release crappy little games where one tiny little sprite shoots little sprites at another little sprite, like people used to do 30 years ago, and crapping on masterpieces like GTA and Call of Duty because they are not innovative enough to go back to the perfect design of little sprites shooting tiny little sprites at other little sprites, all the while wondering why the "Mane Streem" or the "Central River" or whatever doesn't play that shit anymore.

Retards.
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Unread postby icycalm » 29 Jan 2014 08:38

Via email and the hidden development forum:

I wrote:As for the game, after much thought I have decided to publish the preliminary design, which I am elaborating to more than 4 pages. Maybe 10 or so, maybe more. I think it will be best this way. Then people can ask for clarifications, or propose additions or changes (Chaos already suggested co-op to me, which I hadn't considered at all for some reason), and when the whole thing is done I will print it into a little booklet and include it with all the rest of the books that I will be sending to developers when they are all done. It will be extremely instructive to anyone who reads it, and will represent what I call The Last Great Traditional Game. After that comes The Cinematic Videogame, which won't really have what we now call "mechanics" so much, and practically no challenge. But there's no way to make that game until full VR hits, so we are talking another couple of decades at least. So my design will basically be the very last great design before that type of game hits and dominates art for the rest of our species lifetime lol. The other thing is that I have only received half a dozen offers from people to help with the game, and most of these are unusable, so if the design is out there, it might help attracting more people. To be sure, it will also deter many, because of how absurdly ambitious it is, but at this point I don't really care about that. My first priority is to point out the limit of what can be done. What actually gets made has nothing to do with theory but only with the kind of resources we can muster, and we can also just make a very scaled-down Version 1, distribute it for free or sell it, then make an enhanced remake Version 2, and so on and so forth. Besides, the easiest way to make the game would be to simply work out completely the design in the forum, in terms of character backstories and personalities, technologies and weapons, missions, dialogue and story, etc. -- all of which could easily take months, if you want to nail it down completely -- and then just simply wait for technology to catch up and the right middleware to appear. I have no doubt that someone will make an "Open World Game Maker" at some point, at which point a lot of grunt work we might have done up to then would become redundant.

So just wait for me to publish the design on the frontpage, sometime within the next few days, and then you can tell me in the forum what kind of scaled down version of it would be feasible, or what individual components of it we could start working on right away. And then we start chipping away with our little spoon at the mountain and hope that others join in and help out.


Christian wrote:I've posted the prototype in the forum and am now looking forward to your design. Once you've published it, and I've once again come to my senses from having had them blown away, we can begin feature planning for the first version.

Now since you're publishing the design, have you given any thought to offering free Insomnia subscriptions to qualified applicants, i.e. people that want to work on this and also have the skills to contribute? It might make for a more enticing deal.


I wrote:I have a very specific reason I asked people to buy subscriptions. If I hadn't, what would there be to prevent half of TIGSource from "volunteering" to help only to have a peek at the work we are doing? What reason would there be for them to actually help after they'd seen everything? And now you are proposing that I give them a free subscription too? Half the internet would volunteer for that for sure! They'll read the entire site and the hidden forum, and then they won't contribute anything.

So, as with the idea of requiring a subscription to read Insomnia in the first place, the point of it is to weed out who's serious and who's not. Whoever opens his wallet is serious, whoever doesn't is a loser with whom I want to have nothing to do. The only people who get free subscriptions here are the people who have already proven their seriousness by their massive contributions to the artform. Recap, Rando, the Scathing Accuracy guys, the rest of the staff, etc. Now if the equivalent to these guys in the dev world -- i.e. people like Carmack, etc. -- wanted to join the project, they too would deserve free subscriptions, but you know what? These are the kinds of people who'd brush aside the offer of a free subscription and buy one instead, on the one hand because they have money coming out of their ears, and on the other because they genuinely want to support the causes they approve. So, in short, correct me if I am wrong, but I don't see any advantages to offering free subscriptions to volunteers to this project, and several disadvantages.
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Unread postby icycalm » 29 Jan 2014 10:03

lol I just remembered how the Insert Credit guys were saying I'd never manage to make a site back in 2005, or how no one would ever wish to join me and write for it. Then when the site went up, they were saying no one would ever read it. Then when the forum went up, that no one would ever join it. Then when the books were announced, that they would never be printed. Then when the subscription fees were introduced, that no one would ever pay them. Now they are saying that my game will never be finished, or even get started, and that not even a screenshot will ever be published.

Subhumans: utterly failing to predict the future since 30,000 BC (or even to learn the slightest thing from the past, for that matter).
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Unread postby icycalm » 29 May 2014 20:50

First pieces of art from our concept artist, Lorne Hawke.

Landscape-1.jpg

Landscape-2.jpg

Guns.jpg
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Unread postby icycalm » 11 Jun 2014 02:00

https://twitter.com/adnqt/status/476232199822262272

gray! wrote:top disappointment of e3: icycalm didn't announce his videogame at e3


lol just because you didn't get to see it doesn't mean it's not there. It's being shown behind closed doors. (No press sneak fucks allowed to see it though, which is why the only site reporting on it is mine, in this post you just read.)
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Unread postby icycalm » 25 Jul 2014 23:00

First boss, kem@l, and his pet hyena.

Hyena-Man.jpg
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Unread postby icycalm » 17 Mar 2017 05:34

From Discord: https://discord.gg/7ZKAkEj

[The discussion started from me commenting on Qpo's Dawn of War II stream.]

icycalm
lol the jetpack guys look amazing

Qpo
they are the shit
assault space marines :heart: :heart: :heart:
love those guys

icycalm
I can definitely see the appeal of the game. The ideal for me would be a PA with unit detail like this game, where I would be able to command dozens of people like you fighting on dozens of fronts
And now and then I would be required to step in and help out, or go off and defend an outpost, etc., so that I could have the best of all worlds
I've been reading up on 3, and it really sounds like the battles are massives there, at least

Qpo
The ideal for me is PA with 40k. Then the ideal after that is MMOFPSRTS etc., where it's still PA with 40k but every unit is a person playing, and there's layers of hierarchy, higher ranked players get to move up the ranks and so forth. Maybe the very bottom level grunts are CPU, and if there's not enough players you fill out the ranks with CPU. Possibly the lowest rank for a player would be a squad leader. So PlanetSide 2 taken to PA scale with a 40k setting, and you need to really work out some good way for controlling a full squad while playing in first-person at the same time.
Maybe 60% of the squads work will just be to follow the squad leader around and focus the same targets but you still need some commandos. And then some proper melee in a first-person perspective, no text chat, and voice filters so that everyone sounds like a space marie when talking to each-other in-game.

icycalm
The thing is, that ranking as a grunt doesn't mean you'll make a good leader
That's why officers go to academies and grunts to boot camps
So just racking up the kills shouldn't give you promotions
I don't see for any way to get promotions in game
The current system, where people voluntarily follow a leader because they know him from outside the game and trust him, is the best alternative
And my ranking is the reverse of yours
My ideal is PlanetSide viewpoint with PA strategy and Dawn of War tactics
Hell, I would be willing to learn to code to make this game
Throw in Deus Ex role-playing, and I will go into the matrix
How hard could it be to learn to make this from scratch?
How much work would it be?
And at the end of it all, you'll be a millionaire guaranteed
Plus videogame director God on the level of Sid Meier and Kojima
Paging @SriK
Hell, people modded a first-person view into PA
Why could you not mod it into an MMO then?
And it already has many units and good tactics, so all you would need to do is add more units and special powers etc., and you have Dawn of War tactics
And once everything is played in first-person, you could add the dialogue and Deus Ex choices
You would need to add cities, etc. for that though
But cities are just extra structures; people have already modded extra structures in
The only thing is that it would require a monster of a computer to run

Qpo
well the hardware part someone else will solve in the meantime

icycalm
As for money, I am sure that if we got a prototype working, Kickstarter would shower us with dough
If complete amateurs making a prototype such us this is even remotely feasible, I am all in
And after you have some money via crowdfunding, you can bring in some pros too (edited)
Which would bring in more money, snowballing the entire thing
The concept is actually very close to Ubergame's
Ubergame would have been exactly like this, but single-player
Instead of starting with PA, and zooming into Deus Ex, it would have started with Deus Ex and zoomed out to PA

Qpo
I don't remember how much I've read about Ubergame but I've thought about that too. To get to the strategy level you really have to first get into power, then establish a system for ruling, and then actually rule. But in a grand strategy game you already start at the third phase, which is really nice but kinda "cheating", in lack of a better word. So I'd like to go through the previous stages too, and the first would play best as an FPS. I'm not too sure about the second.

icycalm
Realistically, you would start with a PlanetSide/PA/Dawn of War hybrid
because this is the major technical challenge
And once that game was finished and released, you could start thinking about a role-playing infused sequel
So you wouldn't have to worry about plots and campaigns at first, or about promotions in-game
You would just have clans showing up and fighting
You would FORCE everyone to use voice chat, and to enlist with clans
Hell, you could give clans a cut of the earnings, for every new player
They could buy the game on the clans' sites
You could even have different game covers for every clan
And the art for the clans would be made by the official artist
Kind of like how Uber makes the art for the special commanders in consultation with the people who ordered them
The clans themselves would sort out their command structure between them
And if you wanted to be supreme leader?
Start your own clan, for which there will be a hefty fee
Don't have the money or the motivation?
Enlist as a grunt then
And if your superiors become impressed with you, they will promote you

Qpo
I know grunt vs. leader are separate things and as far as I've come to solving it is separate "matchmaking" queues, so that grunt people click "be a grunt" and leader people click "be a leader", and they get placed according to those roles. And I've thought about having those two as the only options of playing, i.e. that there's no other way to play than as a solo person, who then gets matched up together and against people in-game, to really force them into roleplaying their character as they don't know each other. Essentially I want to cut out any trace of irl as people go in. And with "matchmaking" I just mean that is uses those mechanics, you of course want to dress it up as a "Do Your Duty" or something. When you start the game you don't even get menus, but immediately start in first-person, as a civilian (first time) or solider at leave (rest of the times), that jump back in. But it remains how the ranking up should work in-game as I don't really trust having a voting system...

icycalm
Read my earlier posts
I solved the ranking thing
We already do it in our clan

Qpo
had to press enter since I had written it out in parallel

icycalm
lol I know

Qpo
ok lol

icycalm
The least I can do is publish the design as "icycalm's dream game", and then either someone makes it, or at least makes something approaching that, or offers to help me make it
Kind of like how playwrights work
They write the play, and then producers produce it
And there are many versions

Qpo
I've had this vision since 2012 and only talked about it once, when I just first had it, out of paranoia that someone's going to "steal it" and that they won't "get it right" and that I have to make it myself for it to be done properly
There's a bunch of games to make on the way to work on the parts needed for the complete thing, but yeah, it's a huge undertaking
I've thought about writing a comprehensive design document and starting shopping it around to the big companies. Supposedly, I was told from a teacher I had that has been doing this stuff, if your design is good they will more likely hire you than "steal it", as you'd be nice to have around to make it into reality

icycalm
Makes sense

Qpo
but you can't send it to everyone at once because then they will get paranoid, proabbly
man my keyboard is giving out on me, typing too fast lol

icycalm
Can you imagine a crowdfunding campaign involving me?
HE IS A FEDERAL FUGITIVE1111

Qpo
hahaha
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